An empirical investigation

Research Summary: Prior crisis‐response literature outlines zones of conformity (i.e., response meets stakeholder expectations), underconformity (i.e., response falls short of expectations), and overconformity (i.e., response exceeds expectations). We utilize a mixed‐method approach to empirically test the impact of different response strategies on customers (Study 1: experiment) and investors (Study 2: event study). We not only find empirical support that a conforming strategy outperforms both nonconforming strategies concerning stakeholders' affective evaluations of reputation, but extend this proposition to stakeholders' cognitive evaluations of reputation and the financial implications for the firm. The most counterintuitive finding is that overconforming strategies result in lower firm reputation and stock returns relative to conforming strategies. Thus, exceeding stakeholder expectations during a crisis can have unintended negative consequences. Managerial Summary: How should firms react to product recalls? Previous research suggests that exceeding expectations of external stakeholders should have a neutral or even positive impact on firm reputation and financial performance, while falling short of expectations should have a negative impact. In this article, we test the impact of different product recall strategies. The most counterintuitive finding is that exceeding stakeholder expectations during a product crisis can have unintended negative consequences on both customers and investors

Managing customer satisfaction after a product recall: the joint role of remedy, brand equity, and severity

Firms struggle to respond to product recalls and manage post-recall customer satisfaction. In three studies, we examine the impact of firms’ remedy choice on satisfaction and provide evidence that firms’ post-recall remedy efforts are often not optimal. In Study 1 (field study), we estimate the longer-term effects of remedy on different satisfaction metrics and show that offering full remedy is much more important for low and high (vs. medium) brand equity firms, especially when failure severity is high. In Study 2 (experiment), we find further evidence that the positive impact of full remedy on satisfaction is moderated by brand equity in a u-shaped fashion. Finally, Study 3 (experiment) provides further evidence that the relationship between remedy and brand equity is contingent on failure severity. The findings contribute to the literature on firms’ management of negative relationship events and provide managers with the empirically grounded 5R guidelines to make better remedy decisions in response to product recalls

The Hydrogen Atom in Combined Electric and Magnetic Fields with Arbitrary Mutual Orientations

For the hydrogen atom in combined magnetic and electric fields we investigate the dependence of the quantum spectra, classical dynamics, and statistical distributions of energy levels on the mutual orientation of the two external fields. Resonance energies and oscillator strengths are obtained by exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian in a complete basis set, even far above the ionization threshold. At high excitation energies around the Stark saddle point the eigenenergies exhibit strong level repulsions when the angle between the fields is varied. The large avoided crossings occur between states with the same approximately conserved principal quantum number, n, and this intramanifold mixing of states cannot be explained, not even qualitatively, by conventional perturbation theory. However, it is well reproduced by an extended perturbation theory which takes into account all couplings between the angular momentum and Runge-Lenz vector. The large avoided crossings are interpreted as a quantum manifestation of classical intramanifold chaos. This interpretation is supported by both classical Poincar\'e surfaces of section, which reveal a mixed regular-chaotic intramanifold dynamics, and the statistical analysis of nearest-neighbor-spacingComment: two-column version, 10 pages, REVTeX, 10 figures, uuencoded, submitted to Rhys. Rev.

Wave Packet Echoes in the Motion of Trapped Atoms

We experimentally demonstrate and systematically study the stimulated revival (echo) of motional wave packet oscillations. For this purpose, we prepare wave packets in an optical lattice by non-adiabatically shifting the potential and stimulate their reoccurence by a second shift after a variable time delay. This technique, analogous to spin echoes, enables one even in the presence of strong dephasing to determine the coherence time of the wave packets. We find that for strongly bound atoms it is comparable to the cooling time and much longer than the inverse of the photon scattering rate

Simple pressure-tuned Fabry–Pérot interferometer

A simple, compact and inexpensive pressure-tuned Fabry–Pérot interferometer is presented. It is used as a laser locking reference for optical frequencies where the use of an atomic reference is impractical. The scanning range is several GHz. Absolute positioning of the interferometer with an accuracy of 7 MHz7MHz rms over a range of 2 GHz2GHz is possible. The instrument is temperature stabilized and shows long-term drift of 16 MHz16MHz rms over 48 h48h.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87892/2/033105_1.pd

Inferential considerations for low-count RNA-seq transcripts: a case study on the dominant prairie grass Andropogon gerardii

Citation: Raithel, S., Johnson, L., Galliart, M., Brown, S., Shelton, J., Herndon, N., & Bello, N. M. (2016). Inferential considerations for low-count RNA-seq transcripts: a case study on the dominant prairie grass Andropogon gerardii. Bmc Genomics, 17, 16. doi:10.1186/s12864-016-2442-7Background: Differential expression (DE) analysis of RNA-seq data still poses inferential challenges, such as handling of transcripts characterized by low expression levels. In this study, we use a plasmode-based approach to assess the relative performance of alternative inferential strategies on RNA-seq transcripts, with special emphasis on transcripts characterized by a small number of read counts, so-called low-count transcripts, as motivated by an ecological application in prairie grasses. Big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) is a wide-ranging dominant prairie grass of ecological and agricultural importance to the US Midwest while edaphic subspecies sand bluestem (A. gerardii ssp. Hallii) grows exclusively on sand dunes. Relative to big bluestem, sand bluestem exhibits qualitative phenotypic divergence consistent with enhanced drought tolerance, plausibly associated with transcripts of low expression levels. Our dataset consists of RNA-seq read counts for 25,582 transcripts (60 % of which are classified as low-count) collected from leaf tissue of individual plants of big bluestem (n = 4) and sand bluestem (n = 4). Focused on low-count transcripts, we compare alternative ad-hoc data filtering techniques commonly used in RNA-seq pipelines and assess the inferential performance of recently developed statistical methods for DE analysis, namely DESeq2 and edgeR robust. These methods attempt to overcome the inherently noisy behavior of low-count transcripts by either shrinkage or differential weighting of observations, respectively. Results: Both DE methods seemed to properly control family-wise type 1 error on low-count transcripts, whereas edgeR robust showed greater power and DESeq2 showed greater precision and accuracy. However, specification of the degree of freedom parameter under edgeR robust had a non-trivial impact on inference and should be handled carefully. When properly specified, both DE methods showed overall promising inferential performance on low-count transcripts, suggesting that ad-hoc data filtering steps at arbitrary expression thresholds may be unnecessary. A note of caution is in order regarding the approximate nature of DE tests under both methods. Conclusions: Practical recommendations for DE inference are provided when low-count RNA-seq transcripts are of interest, as is the case in the comparison of subspecies of bluestem grasses. Insights from this study may also be relevant to other applications focused on transcripts of low expression levels